Higher education has a compliance problem. It is not a new one. It is complex – built into the relationship between federal law, state authority, and institutional governance, and hiding in plain sight for decades.
On April 20, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice published an Interim Final Rule extending the compliance deadline for Title II digital accessibility requirements. Large public institutions, originally required to comply by April 24, 2026, now have until April 26, 2027. Smaller public entities have until April 26, 2028 (U.S. Department of Justice [DOJ], 2026). The stated reason: the Department determined it had overestimated institutions’ staffing capacity and technological readiness to meet the original deadlines.
What is at stake is not simply a lawsuit or a complaint. It is federal funding, institutional accreditation, and the ability to fulfill the core educational mission. Noncompliance with federal civil rights law can trigger civil rights investigations, monetary damages, and private litigation that proceeds regardless of who occupies the White House. And it can — quietly, systematically — exclude students with disabilities from equal participation in the educational experience the institution claims to provide. For institutions dependent on federal financial aid and research grants, these consequences touch every corner of institutional operations. Understanding the legal landscape is not an exercise for attorneys. It is prerequisite knowledge for every leader responsible for institutional strategy, resource allocation, and risk management.
A Multi-Layered Legal Framework
Digital accessibility in U.S. higher education is not governed by a single law. It is governed by an overlapping, mutually reinforcing system of federal statutes — each with distinct coverage, distinct enforcement mechanisms, and distinct consequences for noncompliance. Understanding this architecture is the starting point for understanding what is actually at stake.
The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities in programs run by federal agencies or receiving federal funds (DeMaine, 2014; NCDAE, 2012). Because most higher education institutions receive federal funding — through student financial aid, research grants, and other federal appropriations — they are required to comply with the Rehabilitation Act, particularly Sections 504 and 508 (Epshteyn, 2019).
Section 504 requires federally funded programs to provide reasonable accommodations for employees and other participants with disabilities, including effective communication for individuals who are hearing or visually impaired, and accessible facilities. In higher education, Section 504 has driven the creation of disability services offices and accommodation frameworks across the sector (Epshteyn, 2019). Critically, the standard is not good intent. It is equitable access — and where patterns of noncompliance are shown, monetary damages and civil penalties follow (DOJ, 2012). Section 504 is also the primary source of legal vulnerability for private institutions. The statute does not distinguish between public and private — it follows the money. Any institution that accepts federal financial assistance, including Pell Grants, subsidized loans, work-study funding, or federal research grants, is bound by Section 504’s nondiscrimination requirements. Because virtually every private college and university in the United States participates in federal student aid programs, the assumption that private institutions operate outside the reach of federal accessibility law is not only incorrect — it is a significant institutional risk (NCDAE, 2012).
Section 508 outlines requirements specific to the accessibility of electronic and information technology. An accessible information technology system under Section 508 is one that allows for alternative modes of operation — keyboard, mouse, or voice navigation — compatibility with screen readers, and the ability to output information in both visual and audio formats (Epshteyn, 2019). While Section 508 was originally directed at ICTs within the federal government, states that receive funds under the Assistive Technology Act — including Massachusetts — are required to comply with Section 508 requirements. This means that information technology systems used by students at most higher education institutions must be accessible, and institutions bear responsibility for assessing accessibility as part of the procurement process (U.S. Department of Labor, 2016; Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 2016).
Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 provides a second, independent basis for private institutional liability — one that operates entirely separately from federal funding. Title III requires places of public accommodation to remove barriers to access for individuals with disabilities (Epshteyn, 2019; Johnson, 2009). Courts have consistently held that colleges and universities, by virtue of offering educational services to the public, constitute places of public accommodation under Title III. This means that a private institution’s accessibility obligations do not begin and end with whether it accepts federal funds. Even in the unlikely scenario that a private institution received no federal financial assistance whatsoever, it would remain subject to Title III’s requirements. The combination of Section 504 and Title III effectively closes any exemption gap that Title II’s public-entity limitation might otherwise appear to leave open. Private institutions are not a protected category. They are doubly exposed.
Title II of the ADA applies specifically to state and local government entities — including public colleges and universities — and prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all services, programs, and activities. The DOJ’s 2024 final rule formalized Title II’s application to digital environments, requiring public institutions to ensure that all web content and mobile applications conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA (DOJ, 2024). This rule represented a significant shift: from a reactive, accommodation-on-request standard to a proactive, universal accessibility mandate. Every website, every portal, every digital course material, and every third-party platform falls within its scope. The compliance deadlines extended by the 2026 Interim Final Rule operate under Title II — but the underlying obligation has existed since the ADA was signed in 1990.
These frameworks are not mutually exclusive. A single act of noncompliance can simultaneously violate multiple statutes. As the National Association of the Deaf demonstrated in 2015 when it filed suit against Harvard University and MIT for failure to provide accurate captions for online course materials, the class action cited violations of both the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act simultaneously (NAD, 2015). Institutions cannot satisfy one statute and consider themselves protected under the others.
The Federal-State-Institutional Relationship
To understand why compliance failures persist, it is necessary to understand how responsibility for education is distributed in the United States — and where the accountability gaps live.
Constitutionally, the states bear primary responsibility for education. But federal interventions have fundamentally shaped the landscape of higher education: the Morrill Act of 1862, the GI Bill of 1944, and the Higher Education Act of 1965 each expanded access and, with it, federal investment (Mumper et al., 2011). That investment came with accountability strings. Federal funding to higher education institutions initially flowed through state governments, but beginning in the early twentieth century, aid increasingly bypassed the states entirely, going directly to institutions in the form of student financial aid and research funding (McGuiness, 2011; Mumper et al., 2011). This created what Mumper and colleagues describe as federal regulation of higher education institutions based on “accountability that accompany the receipt of federal funds” and “the dictates of social legislation” (as cited in Epshteyn, 2019, p. 51).
States, meanwhile, serve as what McGuiness (2011) calls “overseers of public interest” — providing higher education services primarily through subsidies to public institutions and, since the early 1970s, through state higher education agencies charged with statewide policy. These agencies allowed states to demand accountability from institutions and to experiment with innovative policies and programs (McLendon & Perna, 2014). But states differ dramatically in size, demographics, political climate, and governance structure — producing enormous variability in how accessibility-related policy is adopted, implemented, and enforced across state systems (Cooley, 2015; Lowry, 2016; McGuiness, 2011).
The result is a compliance environment in which institutions are simultaneously subject to federal civil rights mandates, state-level accessibility requirements, and their own institutional policies — with no guarantee that any of these layers are coherently aligned. When they are not, the burden falls on students with disabilities, on institutional legal exposure, and ultimately on institutional leaders who signed off on a policy document and assumed the work was done.
The Digital Frontier: ADA and the Courts
ADA’s application to digital environments did not emerge from the statute itself. It emerged from litigation — and the legal precedent is still evolving (Epshteyn, 2019).
Passed in 1990, ADA did not account for e-commerce or digital learning environments. As institutions and businesses extended their presence online, individuals with disabilities who could not navigate those environments brought the question of liability to the courts. The results were initially inconsistent. In Access Now, Inc. v. Southwest Airlines (2002), the court ruled that websites were not places of public accommodation. Later cases applied a “Nexus Test,” established in National Federation for the Blind v. Target Corp (2006), which presumed a place of public accommodation to be physical and required a connection between the website and a physical space. A website that merely extended a physical location had to be accessible; a website without a physical counterpart did not.
That changed in 2012. In National Ass’n of the Deaf v. Netflix, Inc., the court determined that a website could constitute a place of public accommodation even in the complete absence of physical space — a landmark ruling that fundamentally shifted how ADA applies to online environments and paved the way toward broader digital accessibility requirements (Epshteyn, 2019).
The DOJ’s 2024 final rule under Title II built on this legal evolution. For the first time, a federal rule explicitly named a technical standard — WCAG 2.1 Level AA — and set a binding compliance deadline for public higher education institutions (DOJ, 2024). The 2026 Interim Final Rule extended those deadlines. It did not alter the substantive requirements or eliminate the legal obligations that decades of case law and statute have established.
The WCAG Standard: What Compliance Requires
Understanding what the law requires in practice means understanding the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — the international technical standard that sits at the intersection of legal mandate and institutional implementation.
WCAG 2.0, developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and later updated to WCAG 2.1, was designed to make information and communication technology perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust — commonly referred to as the POUR framework (W3C, 2018; Epshteyn, 2019):
- Perceivable — Information must be presented in ways users can comprehend. This includes text alternatives for non-text content, closed captions and transcripts for audio and video, and sufficient color contrast for individuals with low vision.
- Operable — Users must be able to navigate and interact with content through alternative means, such as keyboard navigation rather than a mouse — essential for individuals with motor impairments.
- Understandable — Content must be readable and behave predictably. Forms must identify errors clearly. Language must be programmatically identifiable.
- Robust — Content must be compatible with current and future assistive technologies, including screen readers, across multiple browsers and platforms.
WCAG 2.1 can be implemented at three success levels — A, AA, and AAA. The DOJ’s 2024 Title II rule, and the de facto standard in Title III litigation, both require Level AA compliance (DOJ, 2024; Epshteyn, 2019). In practice, this means that every PDF document must be tagged and readable by a screen reader; every prerecorded video must include synchronized captions and audio descriptions; every online form must be keyboard-navigable; and every third-party platform — including learning management systems, library databases, and student information portals — must meet the same standard, regardless of whether the institution or a vendor controls the technology.
That scope is not incidental. It defines why compliance is an institutional infrastructure problem, not a technology fix.
What Noncompliance Costs
Lawsuits are one dimension of exposure. Loss of federal funding is another — and it operates at a different order of magnitude.
Under the Rehabilitation Act, a finding of noncompliance by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) can result in the loss of federal funding (ADA Title II for Public Entities, 2025). For most institutions, that is not a peripheral consequence. Federal financial aid is the operating lifeblood of the sector. Research grants, which fund faculty positions, laboratories, and infrastructure, are conditioned on institutional compliance with civil rights obligations. As federal scrutiny of higher education institutions intensifies under the current administration, Title II violations are not an abstraction. They are a documented leverage point (Hill, 2025).
Beyond funding, the litigation landscape is escalating. In 2024, more than 4,000 digital accessibility lawsuits were filed in U.S. federal and state courts (UsableNet, 2024). In the first half of 2025 alone, 2,014 lawsuits were filed — a 37% increase over the same period in 2024 (EcomBack, 2025). While education represents approximately 2% of total lawsuit volume, institutions face compounded exposure: accessible PDFs, captioned videos, navigable LMS platforms, and compatible third-party tools are all within scope. A survey of the Educause IT Accessibility Community Group found that nearly 65% of respondents had faced threats of legal action or lawsuits related to technology accessibility (Inside Higher Ed, 2025).
Most claims under accessibility law seek injunctive relief — requiring institutions to remove barriers. However, where patterns of negligence can be demonstrated, claims can also result in monetary damages and civil penalties (DOJ, 2012). Settlements range from thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars when course materials, portals, and platforms are involved. Consent decree compliance — audits, technical remediation, staff training, vendor renegotiation, and ongoing federal monitoring — compounds costs over time.
Reduced OCR enforcement under the current administration does not reduce private litigation risk. In fact, research on prior enforcement patterns suggests the opposite: when federal enforcement decreases, private litigation by advocacy organizations and plaintiff firms tends to increase as those groups fill the enforcement gap (Accessibility.Works, 2026). The DOJ’s own Interim Final Rule explicitly acknowledges that, without the deadline extension, public institutions would face “significant litigation risks” from the private right of action established under Title II (DOJ, 2026).
The Real Compliance Gap
The legal framework is coherent. The financial stakes are documented. The deadlines — even after extension — are specific. And yet, the compliance gap in higher education persists not because institutions lack policies, but because they confuse having a policy with achieving compliance (Epshteyn, 2019).
The two are fundamentally different organizational challenges.
Research on digital accessibility policy implementation in higher education found that most faculty were not resistant to accessibility — they were genuinely unconcerned, because institutional communications about accessibility policy were one-directional, lacked feedback loops, and provided no shared operational definition of what compliance meant in practice (Epshteyn, 2019). The common communication methods — email, faculty senate announcements, department chair memos — are all forms of announcement. None of them constitute implementation.
The DOJ’s explanation for extending the compliance deadline makes the same argument in regulatory language. Institutions had two years of explicit guidance. They still could not comply because compliance requires sustained, observable behavior change at scale — and that requires leadership infrastructure that most institutions have not built. Clear ownership of outcomes. Measurable behavioral expectations. Systems of reinforcement. Accountability for results, not intentions.
A policy document produces none of those things on its own.
What Comes Next
The new deadlines are on the calendar: April 26, 2027 for large public institutions; April 26, 2028 for smaller ones. The extension changes the timeline. It does not change the obligation. The Rehabilitation Act has been federal law since 1973. The ADA since 1990. Section 508 since 1998. The legal architecture was not built overnight, and it will not be dismantled by a deadline extension or a shift in federal enforcement posture.
What is at stake is not a compliance checkbox. It is federal funding, institutional reputation, and the educational experience of students with disabilities who are enrolled right now — not in 2027, not in 2028. Every semester an institution delays meaningful action is a semester those students navigate a digital environment that the law has required to be accessible for decades.
The DOJ’s decision to extend the deadline is not a reprieve. It is evidence of exactly the gap outlined above: the distance between policy and compliance, between what the law requires and what institutions have built the capacity to deliver. Closing it requires more than awareness of the law. It requires the institutional will to treat digital accessibility not as a legal technicality, but as a measure of whether the institution’s stated mission includes everyone.
